


Affinity

by catabolix, taesuga



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Identity Reveal, Kwami Swap, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-02-14 18:37:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13013757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catabolix/pseuds/catabolix, https://archiveofourown.org/users/taesuga/pseuds/taesuga
Summary: Marinette, for all her crime-fighting and day-saving as Ladybug, was still really rather dense. It was difficult for her to admit that there were situations she was entirely unprepared for, obstacles she could not overcome with wit or magic costumes."Mari," Adrien said, staring very carefully at a spot on the ground somewhere to her immediate left. "What are you supposed to do when you lose the only part of yourself that you liked?"It's a good thing she's a fast learner.//Kwami swap/eventual identity reveal. Our kids are in some serious trouble.





	1. Tipsy

**Author's Note:**

> _Or: The Miraculous Adventures of Cinnabar and Siamois_  
>     
> This fic is dedicated to Catabolix, without whom this work would be a terrible mess, and may not even exist at all.

Of all the things Adrien Agreste had carefully shaped himself into being, forgetful was not one of them. Awkward, probably, though he couldn’t really help that. A little dense, perhaps, at least according to Nino. Forgetful? Not usually.

They’d had patrol that night. They always had patrol at night. He should have remembered that like breathing, having fit it so neatly into his life for the past three years. He would wake up every morning, school his expression into Adrien Agreste, and attend lycée as Adrien Agreste. Spend hours staring straight ahead, offering polite smiles to friends. Minding teachers, taking prim notes. Fencing practice, go home, take a shower. Become Chat Noir - finally. Leave Adrien Agreste behind in the too-large bedroom, trade faux nonchalance for impish grins and terrible jokes. He loved it. He adored nothing more.

Chat Noir had never forgotten a patrol.

To be fair, he reasoned with himself, it wasn’t entirely his fault. As much as he liked to pretend his life was his own, the huge monthly modelling schedule tacked to the foyer wall said otherwise. His father often liked to pin things to it without notice, expecting perfect compliance without question or hesitation. Typically, it was done in the mornings before he left, but on the day of the latest patrol he had found the schedule board empty. However, by the time the bell rang for lunch this time, Natalie was waiting outside with a car to whisk him away.

“Sorry, dude,” Nino sighed, leaving him at the doors with a solemn pat to his shoulder. “I’ll text you if we get homework?”

“Yeah, sounds good. Thanks.”

Adrien didn’t complain about it. He slid into the back of the shadowy cadillac without a word, accepting the slip of paper Natalie passed to him from the passenger seat without so much as a small nod. “It’s a charity benefit,” she said, turning back to the window. “Your father was scheduled to appear there, but something else has come up. You will attend and give this speech in his stead.”  
Adrien watched the school peel away from him through the tinted window. Once Natalie had returned to her seat, the opaque black divider between drivers and passengers raised. In the front pocket of his overshirt, Plagg wiggled around a little before poking his head out.

“Maybe there’ll be food,” he muttered hopefully. “As long as they feed us, it probably won’t be that bad.” Adrien gently twisted the silver ring on his finger, giving his kwami a small smile in reply.

The benefit itself was held in a mansion in the countryside, almost an hour’s drive from Paris. Adrien spent it quietly, Plagg content to nap the ride away. The car pulled up along a side road, where he was ushered quickly through an indiscreet stained oak door, and into a dressing room that was as lavish as it was large. Natalie appeared behind him, carrying a dry-cleaner’s bag she’d seemingly procured from nowhere. “Change into this,” she commanded, laying it on a chair, and leaving as fast as she’d come.

Plagg welcomed the solitude, clambering out of seclusion the moment the door closed, carrying a cheese cracker with him. He’d have to return to a pocket for the rest of the evening, thus Adrien allowed him a brief freedom around the room as he pulled the expensive black suit on. Donning the clothes was effortless. There wasn’t much he could do about his hair. Somehow, no matter what he tried, it always managed to look slightly mussed. “Maybe you should shave it all off,” Plagg offered helpfully, his cheeks bulging as small crumbs escaped them. 

Adrien clicked his tongue. “And disappoint all the teenage girls in Paris, you mean?” He donned the face of a model as he’d been specifically taught to do for years: Purse his lips. Lower his chin and his eyelids just so. Peer upwards through sun-blonde lashes at an imaginary camera.

“Hey, your hair’s not the only thing they gush about," Plagg cut in. "They’ll get over it.”

“I dunno, Plagg. I’m not really sure I want to lose that hair gel deal.” Bantering with Plagg made any situation easier, if only by a fraction, but the night stood long before him.

The suit jacket weighed on his shoulders, starchy and heavy. The tie hung tight around his throat, squeezing polite greetings and formal conversation into the party's low hubbub of conversation. The collar of the pristine dress shirt itched one particular spot on the back of his neck incessantly throughout the evening, though he tried not to fuss with it while anyone was looking. The speech his father had prepared was dull and impersonal, but he read it nonetheless. He tried to at least smile warmly at his audience. Emotional engagement was not something Gabriel Agreste was known for, while Adrien always tried to breathe some sense of life into his father's words.

Adrien spent most of the benefit by the banquet tables, sneaking morsels of salad cheese into the pocket of his jacket, where they would disappear into Plagg’s mouth with a happy squeak. Every so often, he would hear a snore, or feel Plagg stretching against his chest, and he envied his kwami. The thought of hiding away from the stuffy event felt like a luxury. Occasionally, one of his father’s business partners would approach him and try to engage him in conversation. A reporter or tabloid would try to sidle up to him with subtle questions or obvious baiting. Wealthy suitors would pry at him for artificial connections. Courteously, he would excuse himself from each of them as soon as possible to rotate from one secluded table to the next, evading social engagements like social casualties. He wasn’t sure when he’d moved from cheese cubes to flutes of champagne, but his head was buzzing with an unusually pleasant murkiness by the time Natalie reappeared to bring him home. She did not congratulate or thank him; he considered it a fair trade-off for ignoring how beyond tipsy he had gotten.

Adrien didn’t remember a lot. The drive home seemed to pass in an instant. He recalled undressing in his dark room, silence pressing on his temples like fingers on glass, shucking off the awful dress shirt and not caring where it landed. Plagg grumbled unhappily, flitting from the pocket to somewhere out of sight. From there, he knew the softness of the duvet on his cheek, and nothing else.

Adrien had not considered himself a forgetful person. However, the following morning, he acknowledged that that particular view of himself only applied to sober Adrien. Drunk Adrien was a new beast of a different kind.

So it was guilt that churned in his stomach, after everything else had abandoned it, leaving him in misery in his ensuite bathroom. He curled on the floor by the toilet, burning head pressed to the cool porcelain lip of the bathtub. “She’ll kill me,” he moaned, his voice still gravelly with sleep. “Mark my words, Plagg. By nightfall I’ll be nothing but a smudge against the Eiffel Tower’s observation deck. She’s never going to let me forget this.”

“Probably not,” Plagg agreed, untangling himself from the shirt-nest he’d made on the floor a little ways away. Adrien groaned again. “The road to forgiveness starts with breakfast, though.”

“And which wise, ancient kwami said that?”

“This one. Hurry up, put some pants on. I’m starving.”

Between griping about his pounding head and checking his alarm clock five times before registering what it said, yes it really was time to wake and greet the world, Adrien managed to shuffle into some pajama bottoms. Making his way into the hall, Plagg’s little paws pushing harshly on his nose were the only thing that stopped him from stepping barefoot onto a mess of broken glass laying on the tiled floor.

“Jumping june bugs…” Plagg muttered. Adrien tilted his head around his kwami and took the sight in for himself. Something, or someone, had almost literally turned the place upside-down. Paintings hung crooked from walls, if they’d managed to stay up at all. The rug was bunched sadly in the middle, having slid across the floor underfoot, and the polished hardwood underneath now bore ugly black scuffs trailing all the way to the stairs. The two proud vases that used to guard the front doors were on their sides, the soil and water within spread haphazardly onto the nearby curtains and floor.

“There’s no way I could have been drunk enough to do this,” whispered Adrien, only partially to himself, as he tiptoed around the broken shards and into the foyer. The sunlight on his face was harsh, but he fended it off with a weak hand as he surveyed the damage.

Plagg moved towards a pile of scattered envelopes that must have fallen out of one of the hallway desks. “Could someone have broken in?” he asked. Carefully, he began shuffling the white envelopes into a pile with his paws.

Adrien shook his head, before realizing Plagg wasn’t looking at him and couldn't see. “No. The security system is still on.”

He paused for a moment, then raised his voice as loud as he dared. “Natalie?” There was no response. His words echoed strangely off the bare walls and haphazard halls. “Is no-one here?”

He and Plagg spent what must have been twenty minutes padding silently, warily around the abandoned mansion, peering into empty rooms that not even his father had graced in years. They weren’t dirty normally, per se - the housekeepers saw to that - but nevertheless, there was something so cloying and still about them that Adrien didn’t like to be there. “Nobody,” he sighed in confirmation to Plagg, re-emerging with him into the foyer.

“Well, I suppose that’s fine,” Plagg intoned, looking about at the mess one final time before floating lazily in the direction of the kitchen. “Do you want any cheese? I might save some for you if you want.”

Adrian grimaced, the thought of eating something so pungent making his stomach clench. “No, thank you.”

Through his roiling stomach and pounding head, he only managed to chase a piece of toast down with a glass of water, while Plagg soundly devoured several packs of cheddar on the tabletop beside him. Adrien traced a finger around the rim of his glass.

“Shouldn’t we call someone?” Plagg murmured after a little while, looking up from his cheese with questioning eyes. “Y’know, like the police. This place is pretty trashed.”

Adrien tilted his glass this way and that, slowly, watching the remnants of the water catch the sunlight from the large kitchen windows. “We can’t.” He pursed his lips into a straight line. “I'm really worried about it, but Father made it pretty clear how he feels about having law enforcement here.” With his free hand, he messed his fingers through his hair briefly, before resting his head against his palm. “I’m certain he’ll have it all cleaned up by this afternoon anyway.” He blinked owlishly towards the windows, and heard Plagg’s quiet sigh.

When the last of the cheese packages was empty and Plagg couldn't coax anything else into his mouth, they silently headed back to Adrien’s room. He dressed robotically for school, pressing anxious thoughts and worries out of his mind, if only for the time being.

Heaving open the heavy mansion doors into the sunshine of the outside world, he began the transition into his day.

The car that usually waited to take him to school was absent, but after the state of the house, he found he wasn’t entirely surprised. “A proper ghost town today,” he commented, and made his way down the drive. Adrien, to his memory, had never walked to school before. He found himself enjoying the solitude of it despite the events of the morning - the smell of the early morning air, the gentle fog that enshrouded the Parisian skyline.

Plagg held on to the collar of his overshirt, purring happily. “You should ask your father if you can do this every day,” he trilled, nuzzling Adrien’s neck. “I never get to hang out with you like this.” His charge tucked his hands easily into his jean pockets, though he worried one corner of his lower lip with his teeth.

“Do you remember anything about last night, Plagg?”

“I got home with you, remember?” There was a small huff by his right ear. “No, I don’t remember anything strange. It was dark, you were intoxicated. I was more worried you were going to trip and hit your head.” They crossed an intersection, Plagg tucking himself close to Adrien’s hair to stay out of sight of a man crossing in the opposite direction. “Natalie was with us when we got there, but she disappeared soon afterwards.”

The consistent pounding of his feet on the pavement lulled Adrien into a sort of easy trance. He passed a jeweller’s, and then a bakery, with the smell of fresh bread clouding pleasantly around his head. He felt Plagg lean away from him, sniffing the air with a pleased little wiggle. “It’s my turn to ask a question,” the black kwami said then, as they rounded the corner and left the bakery behind. “Why doesn’t your father want the police in the house?”

Adrien scoffed. He had asked the same question of Gabriel in the past, when presented with the fact. He’d been ushered around the various offices then, into his workroom, and fed a long piece about trade secrets and “valued, confidential information”. Adrien had received the message loud and clear. ‘Mind your own business.’ He did not ask again.

“My father has a lot of sensitive information relating to his work in that house,” Adrien told Plagg. “If there’s any one consistent thing that he is, it’s secretive.”

“Secretive enough to trash his own place without warning?” Plagg’s voice now came from behind his shoulder, as he ducked out of sight once again.

“What makes you think he did it?”

“I never said he did. It was grasping at a theory at best.”

As they approached the front gates of the school, Adrien held his shirt pocket open, and Plagg dropped into it obediently. The schoolyard was mostly empty, so he mumbled, “I’m sure if he had anything to do with it, he’ll say something later when this is all sorted out.”

The atmosphere in the classroom was strange, right from the very start. For one, the seat right behind Adrien’s was empty, and the one to its right was occupied by an incredibly jittery Alya. She was leaning over her desk, speaking to Nino in frantic whispers. His other classmates were the same, all grave-faced and urgent, with attention turned to their phones or gossipping with hunched shoulders to one another. “Where’s Marinette?” he attempted meager conversation, sliding into his chair. Alya was upon him immediately, leaning precariously ever further over her desk.

“Adrien!” Her voice came as close to shouting as one could while whispering. Her eyes were wide and intense behind the rims of her glasses. He laughed, just a little, emotions too jumbled to react properly.

“That’s my name, yeah.”

She all but thrust her phone in his face, far too close to make out whatever was on the screen. “Didn’t you check the Ladyblog? It’s everywhere!” With a gentle hand on her wrist, Adrien moved the phone back enough so he could see it. However, before he could read the article, Alya pulled her phone back and began reading it aloud to him, apparent impatience lacing her words.

“Ladybug, last seen fighting an Akuma in downtown Paris last night, has vanished. The mysterious absence of Chat Noir was not missed by onlookers. When she was last spotted, she had been backed into an alleyway. Reports of what happened next vary from source to source, but she did not re-emerge from the alley as this journalist could see. The akuma did not return, however, so it is a safe bet that she defeated it and simply chose to slip away undetected.

“Nevertheless, the missing Chat Noir coupled with no further sights of our heroine has caused stirs of concern within Paris. Ladybug has never been seen without him for such lengths until now.” Alya’s mouth twisted into an uneasy line, and she slowly set her phone face-down on the desk between them. Honey brown eyes trapped him uncomfortably in her line of sight, her own anxiety and worry mingling with his own.

A shiver of cold terror raced down Adrien’s spine. It took every ounce of his lifelong posing and faking experience to keep it off his face. “Maybe he has the flu,” he joked, words stinging in his mouth. “Or hairballs,” as Plagg tried to pat reassuringly at his chest through his shirt.

From his side, Nino snorted. Alya just shot them both a look, one after the other, lingering on Adrien perhaps a touch longer than he thought he deserved. “It’s not funny,” she insisted. “You heard it. Chat Noir is always where she is. Not even Ladybug is invincible, Adrien!” She stabbed her own desk with a finger for emphasis. “She needs him.”

Guilty green eyes fell to his lap. She had needed him, it was true, and until last night he’d always been there for her. Adrien felt incredibly foolish about the entire situation. As a loose general practice, he didn’t drink. He had toasted with his father on his 18th birthday, but he found the wine bitter, and couldn’t stomach it for very long. He had never been drunk before, as it wasn’t proper for someone of his stature to drink in excess. He’d heard the words spoken aloud by his father enough times to imagine it clearly now.

With a bravado that was nowhere near attached to him, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Ladybug? Surely not. If there’s anything she is, it’s capable. She can hold her own.” The familiar taste of bile after being someone he was not tinged the back of his throat, and seemed only to add to his headache.

Alya was neither convinced nor comforted by his words. “You didn’t see that Akuma, Adrien,” his classmate murmured. “I’ve seen a lot of them. If Ladybug ever struggled, she had Chat Noir to back her up. It was never like this. There was never...”

A pause, thick with worry. “Nobody saw her come out of that alley. Nobody saw her repair the damage. It’s all still there.”

A skipped heartbeat. Two. Then his heart leapt desperately for his ribs, clawing out its harried pattern against his throat as it went. ‘She’s fine,’ it begged him, ‘She’ll be fine. You’ll see.’ Adrien sat listlessly in his seat as class began, and barely registered the passing time, though he knew it must have been hours when he next moved. His legs had fallen asleep. By lunch, he couldn’t bear to sit still any longer. Leaving his bag back in the classroom, Adrien fled the schoolyard. He didn’t want to return to class, didn’t want to go back to the upturned Agreste mansion. “Plagg, claws out,” he choked, dropping into a crouch to duck through a gap in the school’s back fence and into the shadows beyond.

Chat Noir slunk through the streets of the city he loved, hiding his face from her people. He heard the same thing in mutters and whispers on the streets no matter where he went; Ladybug had been defeated, and nobody had seen her since. From the shelter of a hanging balcony, he surveyed the lingering Akuma damage, scattered broken streetlamps, upturned pavement. Sections of road had been fenced off by the police. A number of law enforcement milled around the area, looking as lost as he felt. If he had to apply a specific definition to the feeling, it was as though Paris itself was waiting for something. ‘Waiting for her,’ his brain corrected, and he managed to grit his teeth only a little as he turned away and slunk back into the shadows. He had no comfort to offer the city, nor the courage to confront her citizens on his own; not after his absence the previous night. Ladybug was a hero of the people, and he was a hero of his Lady.

He dropped down into the alleyway where she was last seen. He knew he wouldn’t find any clues, but he moved there on autopilot, as though she might reappear to assuage his fears. The alley itself wasn’t exactly a dead-end, a chain-link fence at its rear opened onto a narrow side street, so he supposed she could have gone out the other way without being seen. However, the lingering damage to the neighbourhood was incredibly unlike her. Ladybug always used her restoration magic to reverse whatever havoc an Akuma caused. The only logical conclusion he could come to was that she hadn’t had the opportunity last night. “Which would only have happened if she’d been defeated,” he finished under his breath. Not knowing, he realized, was worse a pain than he’d anticipated.

The shelter of a large tree nearby in a park became an impromptu hiding place as Adrien sat high in its branches, feeding cheese crackers to Plagg to restore his energy. A few hours had passed since he left the school. He supposed it was over for the afternoon by that point. “Nino probably has my bag,” he sighed, pensive, scaring Plagg with the sudden sound so badly he nearly fell from the tree. With half a cracker in his mouth, a muffled hiss escaped around it.

“Oh, you do remember how to talk!” He chewed grumpily in between words.

Adrien gave him an apologetic frown, which Plagg promptly ignored. “What are we going to do?”

A pause, hesitation. Plagg swallowed his mouthful. “About what?”

Hands thrown wildly outward in gesture, “About this! About everything!” he cried. “I’m trying to focus on just one thing, but my head won’t sit still long enough for me to make sense of it! My home is trashed, and everyone who should be there is missing. Ladybug probably lost a fight last night and hasn’t been seen since. Downtown Paris is in shambles, and I am an abysmal excuse for a partner who left his Lady to fight alone because he got drunk at a benefit!” He brought his palms down harshly on the tree beneath him. The bark stung. He’d raised his voice without noticing, and immediately felt that his volume was far too high for staying hidden. Adrien snapped his mouth shut in shame. Angry, embarrassed heat pricked over the bridge of his nose.

Even if Ladybug forgave him for this, he wasn’t sure he could forgive himself. Adrien's loyalty was one of a very few select personality traits he was sure of, Chat Noir or not, and now it was worth nothing to the person who was worth his everything  
An unyielding sense of failure hung over him like a shadow, surmounting the anger and humility he felt at what he had done, or rather, what he hadn’t done. They didn't speak again as he made his way back home, regret and fear clouding his thoughts.

The state of the foyer hadn’t changed, likely meaning that nobody had been home since they'd left. “Come on,” Plagg called, after they’d idled passing seconds at the door, “Let’s look around again.” They climbed the foyer stairs to the dark second level, a long and desolate hallway with many identical ivory white doors lining it. One, at the far right wing, was ajar. A trail of destruction seemed to lead Adrien naturally towards it. “This is Father’s study,” he whispered softly to Plagg as they approached, despite the overbearing solitude in the Agreste mansion. A childhood of stern warnings never to approach this room while his father was away had instilled within Adrien a deep-seated, if not slightly irrational, fear of what lay beyond the plain door. He felt somewhat like a naughty preschooler as he reached a hand out to push the door slowly inwards. Plagg rushed through the gap as soon as he was able, crowing “Treasure hunt!” as he went. 

Inside, chipped wood from frames and chunks of priceless statues littered the ground, holes having been punched through the wall and glass shattered all over the hardwood flooring. The painting on the far wall, beyond his father’s desk, hung ajar from its gilded frame. The door of the safe behind it glinted in the dull light. “Treasure hunt, indeed,” Adrien spoke as he stepped around the desk, feet crunching against the pieces of broken porcelain and stained glass.

Plagg deposited himself atop Adrien's head to lean forward expectantly, hanging onto his hair for balance. “Oooh, tell me you know the passcode!” he squeaked. “What if there’s priceless, aged Camembert in there?”

“My father’s not really into cheese, Plagg.”

The kwami tutted. “You don’t have to be into cheese to appreciate it as art.” He pressed one dark little ear to the safe door. “I could crack this if you don’t know the code. Like in the movies.”

Adrien snorted, but didn’t say anything. The last time he had gotten into anything of his father’s, the passcode had been his mother’s birthdate. He assumed there was no way it could be that simple once more. Nonetheless, Plagg was getting impatient, and the weight of suspense held Adrien in place. He ushered the little fuzzball away from the lock with a wave and, with bated breath, put in the only thing he could think to try. With a click and a small pull, the safe silently, and surprisingly, swiveled open.

The safe was much fuller than Adrien had expected. He noted the stack of folders, the lockbox, the small framed family photo. “No cheese,” whined Plagg.

Adrien didn’t entertain him. Instead, his eyes were drawn to a pair of simple red earrings, laying boxless and haphazardly on the bottom of the safe. There was nothing extravagant about them, no outward reason for them to be there - they had certainly never belonged to his mother, and he couldn’t see why his father would own them.

Unless…  
It was as though a weight had dropped down onto his chest.

“Plagg,” Adrien whispered, reaching for them reverently. “I’ve never needed you to call me an idiot more than I do now.”


	2. Regret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fall apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're so sorry for the wait. I (punnpkin) have been in the hospital recently, so this chapter got delayed far longer than we wanted.  
> Rest assured, Affinity will update more often now that I'm out. :)
> 
> As usual, you can talk to us, ask us questions, and see concept art for Affinity [over here on Tumblr](http://punnpkinpatch.tumblr.com).

Adrien sat unmoving on his sofa for a long time, the spotted pieces of jewelry laying dormant in his upturned palm. He felt like he’d forgotten how to breathe - every inhale and exhale laborious and forced through clenched teeth, as though he had to remind his brain how to function properly. The red earrings in his hand swam in his vision. Plagg sat on the inside of his wrist, dangling his feet over the edge, his head hung as if his thoughts held as much weight on him as they did his mood.

“This can’t be real.” Adrien’s voice sounded like it was underwater even to his own ears. Was this just a nightmare? He clenched his fingers hard around Ladybug’s miraculous, and felt the studs dig into his skin sharply, sensation feeling echoes away. His own ring burned on his finger.

Plagg looked up at him, with exhausted eyes. “They’re definitely Tikki’s,” he said. “She’s in there.”

“You can tell?”

“It’s a kwami thing, I think. Or maybe it’s a creation-destruction thing. Either way, I know she’s there.”

For a brief moment, hope fluttered weakly in Adrien's chest. “Can you talk to her? Ask her what happened?”

Plag shook his head, his ears drooping. “I can’t bring her out, either. She… I get the feeling she’s waiting for something. Someone. Ladybug, probably.” Adrien just nodded, numb.

“Did she suffer?” he whispered. The thought of his lady and her kwami, injured and separated, made his heart beat painfully. His fingers fell lax.

Plagg regarded the earrings with a tipped head, thinking for a moment. “I don’t think so,” came his eventual solemn reply. “She’s dormant - just sleeping.” He crawled into Adrien’s palm and curled up around the earrings, mumbling quiet things to Tikki that she couldn’t hear within.

Adrien hadn’t let the miraculous out of his sight since discovering them. He snatched them from the safe faster than he could see, slamming it shut behind the painting and escaping to his private wing of the mansion without looking back. Why did his father have Ladybug’s miraculous -  her kwami - inside his safe? Had he found them? Why hadn’t he told someone? It was the second time Adrien and Plagg had discovered something to do with the miraculous in that safe, after that book. As her partner, he felt that he had every right to take them from the safe, be it his father's or not. Any ounce of his relationship with Ladybug immediately trumped the laughable father-son relationship the Agreste family maintained. Plagg had seemed to agree with his unspoken sentiment, floating away momentarily to close Adrien’s bedroom door behind him, rejoining him on the long sofa after.

“This was.. that night I wasn’t there,” Adrien realized. "I can’t imagine her losing to anyone, akuma or no. They must have tricked her.” He thought then of the girl beneath the mask, how she must be feeling without Tikki or her miraculous. “My Lady…”

He had no idea who she was, or where to find her. He couldn’t console her. A frustrated groan escaped him, and he pressed his free hand to his forehead. “I feel so helpless,” he explained, as Plagg hovered near his face. “What am I supposed to do now? Ladybug would definitely know what to do if this were reversed. I’m not the brains between us, Plagg. I only know how to ruin things.”

There was nobody he could turn to, nobody he could ask for help. The realization of just how alone he and Ladybug were as heroes was an unwelcome one, but he’d had her at his side before. It hadn’t bothered him, then. Adrien was never more sure of anything than he was of his Lady at his back, by his side. Leading him through Paris with coy, over-the-shoulder glances and sparkling laughter. She believed in him. Believed in Chat Noir the crime-fighter, equally as strong as she was, a fact she once spent a good week reminding him of when she’d caught him worrying. They were a team. He would not give her up for lost.

Adrien stood up from the sofa forcefully. “Plagg, we’re going.” He laid the precious earrings on the seat.

“Going? Where?”

“We can’t just do nothing! We’re Chat Noir, we’re a superhero, Plagg! And more importantly, we’re a part of a team. That doesn’t suddenly stop being true just because Ladybug is in trouble. It makes it even truer.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes, fixing his kwami with a determined glare.

“First and foremost, Paris still needs us. Ladybug would tell us so if she was here. And until she is, I will defend her city.”

Plagg gave Adrien a scrunchy-eyed smile. “Nice speech, dork,” he trilled happily. “You’re right, though. We have to do whatever we can to reunite Tikki with Ladybug, but Hawkmoth is still out there.”

“And he believes he beat Ladybug for good,” Adrien added with a slight scowl. “He’s probably going to ramp up the Akumas tenfold if he thinks he’s close to winning. I can’t afford to slack off.” With a roll of his shoulders, Adrien offered his fist to his kwami, who bumped his own little paw against it.

“Go, Captain Dork!” Plagg beamed a pointy grin at his chosen. “You owe me so much cheese when we find her.”

Adrien just snorted in assent. “Transform me, Dork Jr.”

Plagg was laughing, even as he spiralled into the silver ring with a flash of light. The familiar warmth of transforming brought relief to his shock-chilled limbs, and soon he was standing in his bedroom once again, only now Chat Noir. Scooping up Ladybug’s earrings, he tucked them securely into the pocket at his ribs, zipping it closed tight after them. Plagg would keep them safe within the suit. There was no conceivable way he was going to let them out of his sight again.

Chat started his patrol at the place where Ladybug had reportedly last been seen. It looked little different than the photograph in Alya's article, unsuprisingly. The police partitions were still in place, the uniformed officers still keeping the public from entering the murky alleyway. “It’s a place to start,” he mumbled to himself, dropping into the alley’s shadows on silent feet, before strolling out onto the footpath. Almost immediately after coming into view, a middle-aged officer hurried over to him with the most relief on his face Chat had seen on anyone for a long while.

“Oh, thank god, Chat Noir,” he wheezed. “You’re safe.” The man’s face was lined and haggard, with dark circles around his eyes. Chat doubted he’d slept or left the site since the incident.

Unsure he deserved quite that amount of appreciation, Chat Noir nonetheless gave the man the most genuine smile he could muster. He knew from experience how dangerous a panicking public could be. “We haven’t let Paris down yet,” he joked, shifting his weight to one hip in what he hoped was a casual gesture. The officer heaved a great sigh at his words.

“Ladybug?” he asked, hopeful. Chat hesitated, then shook his head, and saw the officer’s face fall.

“I hope you don’t mind me conducting my own investigation,” Chat hurried on, eager to change the topic, and to avoid more questions. “Is there anyone I could talk to? Witnesses?”

After being directed to a police van parked across the way, he ducked his head around the ajar rear doors to find two other officers inside. Many large screens and panels lined the inside of the cabin - the largest of which held a mid-action photograph of his Lady that he didn’t recognise. He tried not to stare too hard at it as he knocked on the door gently.

“ _Bonjour~_ ! I was told one of you fine officers was present last night?” Chat flashed his most Chat-like grin at the nearest officer, a woman who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Her dark hair was pulled into a tight bun at the base of her neck, and thin-framed glasses sat in front of her sharp grey eyes. Behind her sat an older gentleman, his beard and hair grey as the overcast sky. Neither of them seemed as relieved to see him as the first officer had been, but Adrien couldn’t say he was surprised. _‘I’d be pretty annoyed with me, too,’_ a small part of his brain whispered, as he stepped around the door and inside the van.

The lady officer turned her desk chair towards him, setting a large headset down on the desk beside her. Though her face wasn’t unkind, the set of her brow let Chat know that she wasn’t entirely pleased to see him, additionally that his usual joking around probably wouldn’t fly with her. Slowly, he let the grin fade into a pleasant, but reserved smile, folding his hands behind his back. “Nice to make your acquaintances. I wish it could have been under more pleasant circumstances.” The older officer gave a polite nod, while his partner merely creased her brows further.

“I take it you want a statement from me?” Her voice was pinched, forced. “There’s not much I can tell you that the press won’t. I’ve already shared everything I know.” With folded arms, the lady finally moved her sharp gaze away from him, and turned to a monitor near her chair. Chat leaned to the right, craning his head to see the news headline displayed on it. There was a great deal of scary bold text that he couldn’t read. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Straightening back up, Chat chewed one corner of his lip for a moment. “It’s not really a statement I’m after. I’m just looking for some, any information.” He could see that she wasn’t eager to leave her work. In the back of the van, the other officer nudged his partner.

“The break will do you good,” he said to her, kindly. He got to his feet and edged around her chair. “I’ll go for coffee, leave you to it.”

“Officer Blaise,” the lady said after a while. With a slight turn of his head, Chat saw her spinning a fountain pen between her fingers. “Naturally, I already know who you are.”

“You’ve heard of me?” A slow smirk wound its way onto his face. It was a habit he was well-familiar with; joking to take the edge from a tense situation. Ladybug had often chastised him for it. He’d never managed to figure out if puns genuinely bothered her, or if she simply enjoyed teasing him. The passing thought panged his chest.

Officer Blaise, as he'd predicted, didn’t appreciate his humor. “I’ve heard a lot of things about you, on any and all days, but nothing last night.”

 _'Ouch.'_ The shame Adrien had tried to control up to this point tore its way to the surface. It wiped the smile from his face instantly. Staring out across the nearby park visible from the vehicle's back, Chat took a deep, slow breath, and allowed all traces of forced pleasantness to drain from his face. If she wanted to be scathingly serious with the conversation, he’d meet her there in spades.

“With all due respect, officer, I didn’t drag you away from your work to discuss myself, as flattering as the notion may be. Unless you somehow managed to miss it on all those big screens you're studying, my partner vanished last night.” He slouched against the door of the van, arms crossing against his chest, allowing his posture to falter lazily as he waited for her to process his words. He’d just been incredibly rude to a member of the public, and a police officer at that - but Chat Noir was not famed for his manners. Ladybug was the beau of Paris. Ladybug was the one who spoke to the press, and was adored by it in return. The harsh reality of it all was that people hadn’t much cared what Chat Noir said.

Blaise barked out a short, humorless laugh. “It’d be hard to miss,” she hummed. “It’s only plastered on every vertical surface for miles. They’ll be putting her face on milk cartons by the weekend.”

“Do you think that’d help?”

“Not unless Hawkmoth buys milk at corner stores, and is feeling particularly remorseful.”

Chat grinned at her harshly. “That’d be fantastic. If it was as easy as catching him grocery shopping, I could retire tomorrow.” While the banter had seemed to loosen Blaise's stressed shoulders and open the way for discussion, Chat offered no pause in his stoic focus.

He retrieved his staff from its holster at his back, sliding the middle panel up to reveal the screen there. With a few presses, he brought up the audio memo program. “Do you think you could tell me about the akuma that showed up last night?”

They spent the next ten minutes poring over the details of the fight as she remembered it. Blaise procured a small notepad from somewhere on her person, even sketching out a few visual details she’d noticed about the akuma that had disappeared into the alley with Ladybug. When he left, her little slip of paper held tight in his hand, Chat Noir found himself feeling better about the situation than he’d expected. Now he knew, at least somewhat, what to look for. As long as he had a plan, a concrete, step-by-step process, he could follow it automatically. One thing at a time. It helped to calm him as he set off in a half-run towards the Eiffel Tower.

Typically, they would have approached it from the sky, so as to avoid the public - but Chat didn’t much care for that now. If anyone noticed him, they made no move to speak to him, anyway. It felt strange to be jogging down a civilian footpath as his superhero alter ego, the bell at his throat chiming softly with every footfall. Not even the uniformed guards at the tower’s base spared him anything more than a passing glance. They barely reacted as he vaulted himself up the beams and onto the service ladder. There was no better place to make himself seen than Paris’ most famous landmark, after all. It had been close to a full day since Ladybug’s defeat. With one of them down, Hawkmoth would be champing at the bit to get the other, not wanting to squander the advantage. Chat Noir knew that the akuma would be back for him. He was sure it was looking for him already. Steady feet found purchase on a wide beam almost halfway up the Tower, and he dropped into a comfortable crouch, settling down to wait.

He didn't need to wait long. No more than ten minutes had passed before a cold gust of frigid air battered up his spine and wormed its way under the collar of his suit. Chat tried not to shiver as he turned his head to face the akuma that stood across the gap, staring at him with eerie, acid-blue eyes.

"You expected me." Her voice was completely flat, and emotionless. She was not surprised to see him.

Officer Blaise had described a tall, waif-like girl with pearl-white hair, but had neglected to mention the sharp drop in temperature that surrounded her. She was also older than he’d assumed - the person beneath the corruption must have been in her early twenties, at least.  Her bodysuit was cut in sharp and jarring zig-zags of blue, small bits of the frost that spackled her suit glittered harshly in the Parisian night. A large white muffler concealed her mouth and flapped in the wind behind her. Great talons of ice replaced her hands. The entire ensemble was unsettling, but it was surprisingly avant-garde in its construction, and Chat took a moment to appreciate it with a practiced eye while the akuma wasn’t attacking him.

Her footsteps sounded like splintering ice as she paced slowly down the beam, not quite towards him, but meandering in his direction. With each step she took, the groaning of freezing metal was akin to a grating shriek in Chat’s sensitive ears. All the while, her sickening eyes stared him down. She did not blink. “I am Snow White.”

“You’re a monster,” Chat retorted matter-of-factly. He eased himself up from his crouch, shaking the slight tingling from his legs as he went. “Of course I expected you. How long have I been doing this for? Three years? I should buy Hawkmoth flowers, to thank him for keeping me employed all this time.”

He examined the claws on one hand, hoping his feigned disinterest might annoy his enemy, whom he had long since realized was watching him through the eyes of his twisted creations. Snow White cocked her weight onto one hip, her head tilted. If Hawkmoth was irritated, she didn’t betray it. The emptiness of her face was beginning to make the hairs on the back of Chat’s arms stand on end. How he hated to be looked at by those empty eyes, a false, flat sky of the wrong shade. Not _hers_. Disgust curled in his gut in an instant, like roiling lava, hot and indignant. He could feel it teetering on the precipice of anger, but he would not lose his temper. Not over this. Anger made him reckless, and he wanted to draw the inevitable fight out as long as he was able, extract as much information about Ladybug’s whereabouts as he could. He mirrored Snow White’s slow pacing on his own metal beam, staring her down with a fervour he hoped could match hers.

“He is just the sidekick,” the akuma said then. She was clearly speaking about him, but not to him, and the familiar purple butterfly lined her soulless eyes. “I defeated the Ladybug with no issue. What cause do you have to doubt me in the face of her pet?”

A nasty growl forced its way between Chat Noir’s clenched teeth. Ladybug hated the press calling him her “sidekick”, and he didn’t much care for it, either - but far more infuriating was the insinuation that she could ever be beaten easily. As the glowing butterfly faded, Snow White tutted in apparent annoyance, though her face stayed blank as ever. The ice talons on her arms grew longer, seemingly of their own accord, to curve inwards at the tips; Chat could see the inner edges were serrated with the aid of his enhanced vision. ' _If she hits me with those, I won’t last very long_ ,’ he thought. ' _This suit is durable, but it isn’t completely blade-proof._ ’

“My job as a superhero requires me to ask you nicely first,” he said, one hand already resting on his staff. “Tell me where my Lady is, and I’ll consider going easy on you.”

Snow White did not flinch as she answered, “Give me your Miraculous without hassle, and perhaps you will not end up like she did.” The expected resistance made him angrier all the same. His staff sprung to life in his hand, extending on either end, and he dropped into a threatening crouch.

“Come and take it from me.”

The air whistled strangely around Snow White’s ice talons as she lunged. She was fast, faster than he anticipated - but not fast enough. Chat jerked his torso to the side and cleared the swipe with ease, using the momentum to propel himself in a neat flip down to the next level of the tower. He hopped from beam to beam, sliding down access ladders whenever one was available. The sound of Snow’s heeled shoes clanging on steel followed him close behind. He couldn’t fight her that high off the ground. She could easily corner him with a reach as dangerous as it was lengthy. His staff would out-range her claws if it came down to a face-to-face brawl, but there weren’t many places to go 150 meters up in the air.

Chat Noir slid to a brief stop at the base of the tower, daring a glance upwards - just in time to narrowly avoid the long razor-sharp daggers of ice descending upon him. One skinned the side of his cheek as it went, hurtling past him and gouging a sizeable hole in the road.

“Oi, that hurts!” he spat, turning a clumsy flip backwards, one hand clapped to his stinging cheek. It was a strange burning cold he’d never felt before. He noted that it didn’t appear to be bleeding, however, as he pulled his fingers back to inspect them. Snow White landed with a solid thump at the base of the tower. In front of his eyes, her icicle arms regrew their dagger fingers.

“I advise you find better tactics than dodging,” she warned in her flat voice. “I will not miss again.”

Unleashing a flurry of swipes towards his head, Snow advanced on him once again. Chat deflected most with his staff, ducking wildly out of the way of those he wasn’t fast enough to block, hyper aware of the graze on his cheek. Her claws were much faster than she herself could move. The sound of ice colliding with metal was sharp and jarring, bouncing around the inside of his skull.

 _'I can’t keep this up for long,’_ he realized, even as he felt his legs trembling with exertion. He’d been transformed for almost an hour now, and Plagg was running out of energy. It became harder and harder to block, and his opponent seemed to notice - she directed her next slash at his ribs, and Chat was forced to roll backwards out of range. Snow White huffed a breath through her nose, even as Chat Noir’s came raggedly from his ajar mouth. “I must admit,” she said, bringing her talons back by her side, “You present more of a challenge than your partner did.” She leered down at his crouching form.

 _‘Ignore her,’_ he urged himself. He flexed his fingers around his staff. There had to be a weakness he could use. _‘Think, Agreste.’_

Snow lifted her arms above her head, the ice glinting cruelly in the light of the Tower, before bringing them down with force. Chat moved out of the way on instinct, weaving to the right. Making a split-second decision, he jammed one end of his staff into Snow’s left claw, his heart thumping with satisfaction as he heard and felt it jaggedly pierce the ice. The heavy metal pole went right through it, and using it as an anchor, he flipped onto his hands. With his free claw pinning the other arm to the ruined pavement, he brought one metal heel up to connect with the side of Snow’s jaw. She jerked violently towards the ground with the force of it, her icicle talon ripping free of the staff. Pieces of ice tinkled delicately around them.

He’d done it. He’d managed to hit her - and pretty badly, if her slightly-slumped form in front of him was testament. No sooner had she hit the ground, however, than she was jumping to her feet again, a furious scowl warping her brow. “You will pay dearly for marking my face,” she spat. Her advance upon him was faster, her blows much harder than before, and every one bounced off Chat’s staff with a painful twinge in the bones of his arms. Though he managed to get the occasional hit in, he was taking far more from her. By the time she had backed him into a corner between two buildings, a cut above his mask was bleeding profusely into his swollen right eye, and his bruised and clawed skin was visible through several tears in the forearms of his suit. Desperately, Chat Noir clawed his way up the wall behind him, and dropped into the inky-black alley beyond.

“Your Ladybug fled into the shadows, too,”  she called. Chat flattened himself against the surface at his back. He could hear his own pulse louder than Snow’s sharp heels. All the while, she continued to call out to him.

“The fear in her eyes was palpable. I have never seen someone so terrified, or so desperate. She called out for you, do you realize? Always looking for you, waiting for you to come and save her.”

Chat’s teeth snapped together. His skin burned with anger, and the bridge of his nose tingled dangerously. An odd red tint began to cloud the edges of what little blood-free vision he had. By his waist, his hands curled into furious talons. A terrible, roiling part of himself, buried deep within, began to snarl and roar, urging him to _destroy_. He could hear Snow White clearly, now. Her footsteps approached the corner he was hiding just behind.

He could do it. He could ruin her. He could perfectly envision how she would come apart beneath his claws. She was sound, and he was silence.

A few more seconds. That was all he needed to wait. Just a few more seconds -

“You never came for her.”

_Now._

One step, heavy and steadfast, around the corner. Reeling his clawed hand back, just in time to see Snow’s dead features widen in shock. Her arms began to raise. Too late.

“ **CATACLYSM**!”

The urge to destroy had always been somewhat present inside Chat Noir. It was born of destruction itself, it came with the title, kept at bay only by his nature. Letting it become _him_ was seamless. His claws gouged a burning line down Snow White’s front, cleaving straight through her muffler and her suit below. The icicle arm she’d managed to half-raise disintegrated, melting and turning dark along its edges. She might have screamed. Chat Noir did not hear it. All he could see was her horrified face as her power left her in sickening bubbles of black, all the while he tore at her muffler, her arms - any part of her he could reach.

 _Destroy her rip her_ **_tear her apart_ ** _-_

With a _whoosh_ , the remains of Snow White finally vanished, leaving an unconscious and battered blonde woman laying on the road in her stead. Chat Noir stood above her and heaved for breath. Every part of him was in agony, his arms trembling. It was over, he had won. No relief came.

As the red faded from his vision, Plagg fell listlessly from his ring in a dull green flash, only managing to hover up shakily to Adrien’s shoulder before collapsing onto it. The wound above his eye dripped down onto the defeated woman’s shirt. Adrien sunk to his bruised knees.

Paris was quiet. In his palm, Ladybug’s earrings were impossibly heavy.


	3. In The Rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shame.

Sabine Dupain-Cheng was not the sort of mother to allow fake sick days - which worked out just fine, because Marinette was not the sort of daughter to attempt them. Alya had admitted to doing it a lot in middle school, but Marinette had never dared.

“It’s Chinese mother intuition,” she’d told her best friend, who had scrunched up her nose and laughed. “My mom could find a needle in a haystack just by squinting at it.”

She would not have asked for a day off unless she really felt that she needed one. When she woke, her muscles burned and shook with exhaustion, protesting every movement. In her dresser mirror, she saw bruises patterning her arms and legs, along with a particularly nasty scrape along her left cheekbone. No amount of foundation was going to cover it; she looked like she’d picked a fight with a cement mixer, and lost. What was arguably worse was the chunk of hair missing over her left shoulder - it had come in a lovely little package with the bruise on her face. The Akuma had sheared off at least half of one pigtail in the fight.

It took far more effort than it should have for her to climb down the stairs and make her way to the kitchen. Each step of the stairs sent shocks through her knees, as though her muscles were in shreds. Her mother stood at the counter top, sifting coffee into the percolator while the kettle hummed quietly nearby.

“Mama,” she attempted, her voice grating in her throat. The word came out as little more than a rasp, she’d lost her voice last night, too. Sabine turned partially from the counter, her brow immediately creased with concern. Her eyes followed over her daughter's face and frail frame, taking in her haphazard hair and solemn, scraped face. “Mari?”  
  
“I… I’m not feeling very well. Is it okay if I take the day off?”  
  
Replacing the lid on the coffee tin, Sabine turned to face her daughter fully. “Marinette, what on earth happened to you?” Her voice was edging on panic.

Wincing, Marinette raised her hands to ward off her mother’s concern, waving feebly. “I just fell down some stairs, Mama. Nothing serious. It looks a lot worse than it is.” She attempted a smile, but the scrape on her cheek ached too much for the small movement, so she settled for nodding her head slightly.

Sabine didn’t look convinced, her hands fidgeting together in front of her. "And your hair?”

“Accident with scissors at school. I, uhh… sneezed at the wrong moment.”  
  
With a great sigh, her mother reached over and held the back of her hand to Marinette’s forehead. “My daughter, clumsiest being alive,” she commented after a moment, moving her hand to cup her daughter’s uninjured cheek. Sabine's eyes were bright with a mother's concern, knowing and trusting that Marinette would speak to her if there was a bigger issue. She wouldn't press for any more details, but her thumb caressed Marinette's cheek with worry.

“You don’t have a fever, but you do look exhausted. Did you sleep okay?”

“Not really,” Marinette answered truthfully. The light filtering through the kitchen window was beginning to give her a headache around her temples. “Nightmares, I guess.”

The kettle on the counter clicked softly, a gentle roll of condensation escaping its spout. Sabine carefully poured the contents into a mug, which she handed to Marinette with careful hands before hooking an arm around her daughter’s shoulders to hug her gingerly.

“Thank you,” Marinette said lowly into her mother’s shirt, sinking deeper into the embrace, tired bones aching. Sabine lovingly patted her back.

“It’s my job to know when you need time to rest, Mari.” She ruffled the messy ends of Marinette’s destroyed pigtail, eyes crinkling with her smile.

“Get some rest. See if you can’t turn this into a new fashion trend. Maybe half-shaves are back in fashion?” She ushered Marinette back up the stairs to her room, laughing at the disapproving frown on her daughter’s face.

Sabine gave Marinette one last smile, and turned away to start the day's tasks. They had a bakery to run, after all, so being left alone wasn’t something Marinette had to work especially hard for.

In her room, she set the tea mug carefully on her desk with shaking hands, sinking into the chair with slow, robotic movements. Any faster, any pressure on her limbs, and it would make her wince and clench her teeth.

_‘Now what?’_

Before, when faced with a great problem, Ladybug would analyze her surroundings. Categorize the facts. Take stock of what was in reach, and what wasn’t. Anything could be overcome with strategy, after all - and if Tikki had taught her anything, it was to trust her own intuition.

She blew over the steam curling out of the mug, and murmured to herself. “Facts, facts.”  
  
But Tikki was gone. Hawkmoth had the Ladybug Miraculous. Chat Noir was unreachable, and Marinette was alone with her secrets.

“Okay, less facts.”

She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes until she saw stars, groaning between her teeth. She didn’t have time to second-guess herself, not while her enemy had her Miraculous. She wanted to be moving, but where to? Her legs were jittering restlessly as she carefully blew on her tea again. Tentatively, she lifted the cup to her lips for a drink, momentarily distracting herself by focusing on the small physical movements. The smell of lemons did little to calm her, and the drink came dangerously close to scalding her tongue.

Soon enough she found herself pacing back and forth across her rug, though with her exhausted muscles, it was more of a hobble. With one hand around her mug and the other fussing with the ragged ends of her shorn hair, Marinette tried to piece together the events of the previous night.

 

The air had smelled of rain, the last blue glow of the sun disappearing below the horizon when she set out for patrol. She remembered she wasn’t cold in her suit, though the exposed parts of her face certainly felt the approaching seasonal chill. She’d looked forward to the chance to get her body moving.

It wasn’t often that Ladybug actually encountered Akumas whilst on patrol; they had an odd habit of catching her off-guard during the day. Chat Noir might’ve made a choice quip about watched pots, had he made it to patrol that night, but he was nowhere to be seen. It had felt strange to be scampering across the Parisian rooftops without him.

“He’d better have an excuse ready for standing me up,” she had muttered into the empty Parisian night, staring grumpily at the blank communicator in her yoyo. It was usually capable of locating her partner from a considerable distance away - provided he was transformed. The bright blue grid on the screen was sadly lacking his friendly green paw print, so she could only surmise something had come up in his personal life.

Ladybug came to a stop in a tiny park, sandwiched between the dark brick buildings of the city’s business district. It couldn’t be described as much more than a tiny pond on a strip of grass, but it was dark and shadowed by several willow trees, and was quite pretty despite its location and size. It was the kind of place no passing soul would think to peer into in search of a superhero. She and Chat had found it one evening in the summer, sweating beneath their suits and desperate for respite from the sun. He had joked about drinking the pond water, she’d threatened to push him in. The memory still made her smile, despite her irritance.

She had sank into the dark shade of the trees, folding her legs beneath her, and settled in to wait. “If he’s coming on patrol tonight, he’ll come here first,” she’d told herself.

Marinette remembered the peace quite well. The wind in the trees, sending soft hushes across the grass, while the dark storm clouds swirled above between their leaves. The night had been so quiet, the city slumbering in its safe comfort. Where her memory clouded was the stretch of time between the park and the Akuma. There had been distant screaming, she could have sworn. She must have jumped to her feet, swung over the dark buildings, towards the source of the sound and growing chaos. She might have spoken to civilians, or to the police, but she was sure the Akuma had spoken to her at some point.

A tall woman, with dead, cold eyes staring back at her from the night's gloomy memories. Her words were just as flat and emotionless as her face. She wanted the Ladybug miraculous, as they all did, time and time again.  
Marinette's heart beat a little louder and her pacing got a little faster as her memory switched from fuzzy to crystal clear.

Ladybug’s lungs were heaving. Her legs, usually so strong and sure in costume, were beginning to feel weak with the strain of propelling her forward. It was all she could manage to keep running, to keep moving from shadow to shadow. The red tuning fork Lucky Charm had given her bounced against her thigh alongside her broken yoyo, a dagger of ice sticking jaggedly out of the shiny red compact. Cold. Her entire body was so, so cold, as though Paris had suddenly migrated above the arctic circle. Again and again, she felt the sharp sting of ice grating and pelting on her suit from behind, slashing into it, burning her skin. There were sirens blaring in the distance. The Akuma was so fast. Too fast to see. Too fast to dodge.

“Chat!” Hopeless, desperate, she yelled down a street as she sprinted past it. “Chat, help!”

There was a sharp noise over her shoulder, a horrible, metallic scream that grazed her cheekbone as it passed like a bullet. Ladybug jerked her torso around instinctively, her eyes darting about for the source of the projectile, and that was that. The next blow came on her temple, and then all she saw was the blurry pavement between her frosted lashes, rushing towards her as she fell.  
  
There were only murky, underwater memories after that. Marinette came to on the same pavement, alone, her transformation gone along with her earrings. Her mouth tasted of dirt and iron, and her body felt unreal. She wasn’t sure how she’d made it home from there. The sirens were louder, people were shouting. They had to evacuate the civilians from the area. Somewhere far away, thunder boomed. She woke swathed in her comforter like a baby, still wearing the clothes she’d worn in the previous night, and with a splitting headache.

 

Remembering the disastrous patrol and its consequences did not make Marinette feel any more in control of her situation. Instead, it left her with a terrified knot in her stomach.

Though the notion was already filling her with chagrin, she knew well where she’d have to go next, if she wanted any hope of seeing Tikki again. Marinette took up her scissors from her desk, attempting to manage her hair into a respectable, even length. What was left was just slightly too short to tie back into her signature pigtails, so she left it to fan out around her cheeks and jawline.

As she wobbled her way down the stairs and towards the coat closet, she called out "Mama, I think I'll go for a walk now." In the kitchen behind her, she heard Sabine’s hum of approval. After pocketing her keys and phone, Marinette ducked out the side door and set off for Master Fu’s place at as brusque a walk as she could manage.

The number of times she had ever been to see him could be counted on a single hand. The man and his home shared the same strange air of mysticism, a heavy presence that made Marinette feel like a child every time without fail, even after almost four years in the business of being Ladybug. He was a kind soul, but every time she’d sought out his help, she was reminded of how inexperienced and young she was. It was very likely that he knew more about the miraculous than she could ever begin to imagine. Though, Wayzz was a particularly knowledgeable kwami, so he’d told her.

Everywhere she turned, her own masked face stared back at her from bus stops or posters. She was almost afraid she’d be recognised, with every pair of eyes in Paris currently looking for her, but the divide between Ladybug and Marinette was as polar as ever, especially missing her pigtails. Nobody spared her a second glance.

The Chinatown district of Paris was, blessedly, within reasonable walking distance from her house. It was a tight-packed cluster of blocks, with apartments stacked in crushing quarters above the stores at street level. Their doors thrown wide, their merchandise and displays spilling into the narrow streets, it was one of her favourite places in Paris. Marinette’s mother often visited to shop there, and to chat in Chinese with the locals. Occasionally, they would invite the greengrocer over for dinner, and together they would gorge themselves on dishes from her mother’s homeland. For once, the bakery wouldn’t smell of bread, but of soy and black beans, of chicken and star anise, filled with joy and warmth as the small, round grocer man sung with Sabine in laugh-speckled Cantonese. Those nights were among her warmest childhood memories.

Master Fu lived in a massage parlor he ran himself, in the northmost section of Chinatown. It was one of the few buildings there with a garden, and rows of tall leafy bamboo separated it from its neighbouring buildings. Where other businesses had moved towards the modern eastern age, the massage parlor still retained its traditional exterior; the entrance and windows were framed by beautiful swirled red fences, and the front archway was made of carved wooden beams. Marinette removed her boots and coat in the foyer, poking her head around the corner. “Master?”

The sitting room was richly decorated with oriental cabinets and wall scrolls, tiny bonsai trees lining the cabinet beneath the front window. In the center of the room, a low tea table’s wood gleamed in the light of a paper lantern, and at it sat a rather short man with grey hair. He was already turned towards the entrance where Marinette stood, having set two tea cups and a small pot on the table for her arrival. Wayzz, the loyal turtle kwami, was nestled on a small pillow between them.

“Hello, Ladybug,” Fu said calmly, nodding his head to her, though his eyes were wide as he took in her physical state. “Goodness, you’re certainly a sight.”

Flustered, she bowed in return.

“I’m not sure how you always know when I’m coming,” she said with a weak smile, as she settled at the table across from him. As he poured green tea into each of their cups with practiced patience, Wayzz flitted behind his master for a moment, returning with a folded newspaper he’d evidently procured from a pocket.

“It’s an ancient Chinese trick I learned from a Miraculous master in Peking,” the old man joked. Splashed across the front page was a mid-action shot of Ladybug, followed by the huge red text, “WHERE IS SHE?”.

Marinette lowered her eyes and groaned.“Of course.”

She turned to take the paper and set it on the table, hiding the cover from view, and instead wrapped her chilled hands around the hot cup in front of her. Steam rose in a lazy wave towards the ceiling. On the table, Wayzz was staring at her with confused eyes.

“Ladybug,” the little kwami said, “Where is Tikki?”

Master Fu's eyebrows raised in her direction, eyes pointedly focusing on her blank earlobes. Marinette gnawed on her lower lip. _'This is the hard part,’_ she told herself. _'Admitting that you screwed up.’_

Her master was nothing if not patient. He blew delicately on his own tea, cradling it in gentle hands, though she knew he must be concerned. Steeling herself, Marinette took a deep breath and tried to summon her Ladybug courage from wherever it lay hiding within her. Tikki had always told her that the bravery to be a hero was within her, and not the Miraculous itself.

“Lost,” she huffed out, casting her face down in shame. “The Akuma - she was so fast - I made a mistake,” Marinette blurted in a rush of breath. "I was waiting for Chat Noir to show up, but he never did, and I was distracted - I got hit, and I was falling, and… oh, god, did she get him, too? Is that why he didn’t come?” Her voice broke as the thought occurred to her.

Master Fu’s wizened brow creased in the middle. “The newspapers and headlines had given me warning that last night had not gone well, but I did not anticipate - oh, dear.”

Wayzz gasped, his tiny hands covering his mouth.“Tikki is… lost to us? You mean, Hawkmoth…”

“Yes.” Marinette hung her head in shame, and tried her very best not to cry in front of her mentor. “I woke up on the ground. Tikki - my earrings - were gone. They were taken from me while I was transformed.”

Master Fu only nodded, a very solemn look adorning his kind features. “She will be dormant inside them, so she will be safe, but… Marinette, I don’t believe I need to stress how dangerous a situation this is. The powers of creation and destruction are not meant to oppose each other. For Hawkmoth to have the Ladybug miraculous...” He turned towards the old brass gramophone against the wall, under which the miraculous jewellery box lay.

“I cannot imagine what sort of conflict would arise from that. I believe Chat Noir understands that danger as well, even if he is not aware of the specifics.”

“He’s never been here,” Marinette realized. As alone, as lost as she felt, she couldn't imagine being his shoes, having no idea where she was or what had happened.

Master Fu turned back to her. “Since entrusting him with the black cat miraculous, I haven’t had the pleasure of his company, no,” he confirmed. “I can only surmise Chat Noir hasn’t yet needed my advice, for one reason or another. Taking the circumstances into consideration, however, I believe Plagg will bring him here soon.”

Wayzz sipped his own tea out of a thumbtack, sitting restlessly on the tabletop beside his master. He did not say anything, but occasionally he would look up from his drink at Marinette, his eyes nervous and darting. He was an ancient god, far older than she could comprehend, but the fear on his face turned her gut to ice. She set her cup down on the table with a solid thunk.

“Master Fu, what do I do?”

For a long, uncomfortable moment, the room was completely silent. The old guardian sat with his arms folded and his eyes closed. Under the table, Marinette twisted her fingers together anxiously while she waited. Eventually, she heard Fu exhale through his nose, and mumble something to himself in Chinese, before turning to face the jewellery box completely. Wayzz hovered over to the gramophone horn.

“Please tell the others all you have learned,” the master instructed his kwami. “We may well need their power in the events to come.” The little green turtle spirit nodded, sage, before zipping down the gramophone horn and vanishing from sight. After making certain Wayzz was gone, Fu turned back to Marinette, tenting his fingers below his chin.

“Do not lose hope,” he said, in a careful and even tone. “One way or another, we must retrieve Tikki before it is too late. Surely if Hawkmoth had secured both creation and destruction at this point in time, the entirety of Paris would be aware. Until we know otherwise, it would be foolish for us to give up Chat Noir and the Black Cat miraculous as lost.”

Marinette frowned down at her tea. “What does that mean?”

“It means, Ladybug, that you and I will have to place our trust in Chat Noir for the time being.”

Marinette opened her mouth to protest. She wanted to exclaim that she already trusted Chat Noir. They’d saved each other countless times, had each others’ backs facing monsters born from suffering and forged in pain, all while smiling at the end.

But a small voice in the back of her head, which sounded an awful lot like Tikki, quietly wondered. How much trust had she put in him before? Enough to fight beside her, certainly, but what was beyond that? He had once called her his best friend - a sentiment she hadn’t felt deserving of.

“I’m starting to think it was a mistake. Not trusting him with my identity.” The words left her mouth before she had time to consider them, and once they’d passed, Marinette knew they were true. Whatever fears she’d had about her civilian persona clashing with Ladybug seemed so trivial now. He had always been willing to trust her with that secret. Why had she never been ready to return it in kind?

Master Fu, in his seemingly-endless wisdom, offered her a small, kind smile. From a small cabinet behind him, he retrieved an ornate wooden box, and beckoned her towards him. She shuffled over on her knees.

“Are you certain that’s not your fear coming to that conclusion?” the wise old man said, a glint in his eye. The carved box, now propped open on the tea table, contained several jars of a strange-smelling purple paste. Master Fu took her hand in his, and rolled up the right sleeve of her shirt. He began rubbing the paste into her bruises with gentle fingers. A pleasant tingling over her battered skin soon followed.

Marinette laughed, a breathy, humourless thing. “It definitely is fear. If he knew who I was, we wouldn’t be in this mess. He’d have found me, he’d be here with me right now, and we’d be working out a way to get Tikki back together, as a team. Instead, I’m... alone. Alone, and nobody even knows about it. And so is he.”

With her face cradled in her free hand, Marinette tried to imagine a world in which Chat Noir had known her identity all along. Dropping by her window in the evenings, to pick her up for patrols - and maybe, just possibly, the boy behind the mask, smiling and flirting without the pressure of a looming Akuma. What kind of person would he be? How bad would it have been, really, if she’d only trusted him with that secret earlier?

The Tikki in her head told her, _‘He always means well, but this is about safety. What if he got hypnotized by an Akuma into giving away your secret? Or became an Akuma himself? Who would protect your secret then?’_

 _‘I would protect him,’_ Marinette thought back. _‘We would protect each other. I never want to feel this weak again.’_

Master Fu finished treating her bruises and packed the medicine box back into his cabinet with a satisfied hum. Slowly, Marinette got to her feet again, just in time to see Wayzz return from the depths of the miraculous jewellery box. “I have told them,” he said, “And Trixx would like you to know, Ladybug, that he is ready to become Rena Rouge if he is needed.” The little turtle cast a wary look back at the gramophone, as though he was concerned Trixx would come flying out of the horn, claws bared. Master Fu chuckled. He looked Marinette up and down with a smile still on his face.

“Not so alone after all, eh?” he said in a friendly tone. Marinette had the grace to blush under his scrutiny.

“I… would rather not drag Alya into my mess.” Despite her revelation about Chat, Marinette didn’t think she had it in her to assess her relationship with Alya next. That was a whole other can of worms. Alya had been reporting on Ladybug for years. “The shock might kill her,” she noted.

Master Fu walked her to the door with a comforting hand on her back. “I have a few things to take care of,” he said, “But once they are cleared up, I will get in touch with you. I believe I should be expecting Plagg and Chat Noir as early as tomorrow, if all goes well.” Marinette shot a panicked look at her mentor, and he chuckled back.

“Not to worry, not to worry. I won’t reveal anything about your identity, on my honour as a guardian. I will only report to him what you have told me about your Miraculous - and that you are safe, of course. I’m sure he will be most anxious to hear that.”

The walk home was strangely quieter than she remembered. Though the purple storm clouds rolled back in, betraying the brief sunshine they’d had in the morning, Marinette found herself not quite minding the possibility of being caught in the rain. Her mind was leagues away, trying to imagine a boy with messy blonde hair and friendly green eyes walking her to school - though half his face always seemed to be obscured by something, and it was nigh impossible for her to fill in the gaps. The unmasked Chat Noir in her mind was familiar in his laugh and in his jokes, but so strange at the same time. She almost thought it might be a violation of his privacy to be thinking about it.

In truth, Marinette didn’t really know what to do with herself. Master Fu had all but told her there was nothing _to_ do but wait and believe in her partner, but she didn’t think she could accept doing _nothing_. When she finally got back to her parents’ bakery, shucking off her coat in the doorway, her thoughts were no less muddled. Her mother and father were busy in the shop front, so Marinette climbed the stairs back to her room in silence.

“At times like this, I’d vent to Tikki,” she muttered, collapsing back at her desk with an undignified groan. “Nobody else would understand my superhero problems.”

Rain began to patter against her windows, growing in frequency and sound, until the downpour formed a steady hush framed by the occasional boom of thunder. The storm had finally arrived as the last of the daylight leaked out of the clouds. “Even the weather is sad,” she moaned, burying her head in her arms.

A tiny _tink, tink, tink_ from the window crept into the edges of her notice, different from the steady peltering of the rain, and Marinette swiveled in her desk chair just in time to see the little pebble striking the glass. It might’ve been missed with the storm, had she not been sitting nearby. Cautiously, she peered over the edge of the windowsill, down at the drowned road, following the pebbles to their owner.

Chat Noir stood on the footpath, still holding a few rocks in his hand. Upon spotting Marinette in the window, he raised his free hand and waved casually at her.

The sheer magnitude of relief that swept through her body was almost enough to lift her feet from her carpet. Marinette was absolutely certain she’d never been happier to see her partner in her life. _‘But he doesn’t know you’re his partner,’_ the Tikki-like voice in her thoughts reminded her softly, and Marinette schooled her excitement as best she could before opening the window and sticking her head out into the rain.

“You mangy alley cat,” she called fondly to him over the downpour, “Come in out of the rain.” He smiled back at her, and another wave of relief trickled from Marinette's head into her toes.

By the time she had made it to her balcony door, he was there, dripping rainwater through the hatch from his sodden hair. “Evening,” he chimed, as he climbed carefully down into her room. “I was in the neighbourhood.”

“Isn’t that always your reason for visiting?” She turned from him to fetch the blanket on the back of her desk chair, smiling despite herself. Behind her, she heard him laugh, and almost physically felt her mood rise in response.

  
“You’re right,” he said, “I should probably come up with other excuses to drop by. Would you accept ‘I really, really need a croissant’?”

It was only when Marinette had turned around to answer him that she noticed he was hurt. Seriously hurt, if the blood covering half of his mask and face was any indication. Following his jawline, she could see it had bled for long enough to drip down his neck and below the collar of his suit, parts of which had been slashed open, leaving cruel cuts on the skin beneath. He walked with a slight limp as he settled himself on her chaise, with a wince he tried too hard to cover up. “I’m sorry, I’m getting your furniture wet,” he chuckled weakly.

The blanket in Marinette’s hands fell quietly to the floor as she stared.

“I don’t care,” came her eventual whisper. Her legs seemed hesitant to approach him, as though even the slightest movement would hurt him further, but she forced them in his direction until she was standing between his knees, looking down at his battered face. “Chat, what happened to you?” She thought her voice would have broken, or not come out at all, the stones in her throat lodged uncomfortably so.

The corner of Chat Noir’s mouth jerked upwards, but it didn’t touch his eyes. It merely made her worry more. “Is it that bad?” he asked, pushing a clump of his sodden hair away from his forehead, casting more flecks of water - and to Marinette’s further concern, diluted blood - onto the chaise. “Don’t answer that. I know I look awful. Just a sneaky Akuma,” Chat offered, as a means of explanation. “I was… sort of hoping you could patch me up.”

The same Akuma. It had to be. Either she had come back for Chat, or Chat had gone looking for her, she wasn’t sure which - but she recognised the ruddy, burn-like frost blush around his injuries from her own, which were, blessedly, hidden for the most part beneath her clothes.

Years of clumsiness had forced Marinette to develop the rather useful habit of keeping a well-stocked first aid kit on hand at all times, and she hurriedly fetched it from the depths of her bathroom cabinet, along with a fluffy towel she didn’t much mind getting stained. After instructing Chat to _very carefully_ dry himself off, Marinette knelt on the floor between his legs and began to clean the wounds she could see through his suit. Chat had the grace not to hiss too loudly at the cotton balls she dabbed in antiseptic and applied to his cuts. It took a good 5 minutes of him insisting that his ankle was only sprained for her to give up on it, and so she turned her attention to the gash on his brow. It was, by far, the worst of his injuries. Aside from the startling amount of semi-dried blood on his face, she worried it may need stitches, something she was capable of doing in theory, but a little afraid of. She swept his now-damp hair away from his forehead, trying hard not to aggravate the injury. It was nice to have something to focus on, she realised, and so lost was she in her thoughts about stitches that she almost missed Chat speaking to her.

His voice was so low, barely a breath. “I didn’t know where else to go.” Her eyes darted down to his, only to find his gaze locked on her shirt, in a strange, dazed kind of way, as though he wasn’t really seeing anything. Marinette smiled, more for his sake than her own.

“You picked the right person to come to,” she murmured back. “I doubt anyone else in Paris has had to treat their own injuries as much as I have.”

Chat Noir did not laugh. The corner of her lower lip pinned between her teeth, Marinette shuffled around in her kit for the large bandages she knew were buried in it. Another moment passed before Chat spoke again.

“I felt so hopeless. I was staring right at the thing that- that took Ladybug from me, and I wasn’t enough to beat it. I was toyed with, the entire fight. He mocked me through that Akuma. Like it was a _game_ for him.” In his lap, Chat’s clawed hands curled into angry fists. “He enjoys this! Hurting people. Hurting me, hurting Ladybug. It’s _fun_ to him.” He brought a fist down on the carpet with some force, but there was no anger in it. Momentarily forgetting the patches, Marinette shifted back to sit on her feet, and watched him sadly.

 _‘You should tell him,’_ she thought. _‘He’s hurting.’_

But Marinette’s mouth would not open. An impossible weight settled on her lungs and squeezed whatever words she could have formed from her. She was left with only a horrible feeling of guilt. _‘He should know. He needs to know. Please.’_

Again, Chat brought his fist down on the carpet, softer this time. “I can’t get her back,” he said, his voice breaking twice through clenched teeth. “I fought harder than I’ve ever had to, and it wasn’t worth anything. I can’t do this alone, I’m not a hero without her.”

 _‘Please. Please, tell him. Say something,’_ her heart begged.

“That’s not true,” her mouth said instead.

Chat’s head dropped onto her shoulder, the ears atop his head drooping to almost lay flat. “Mari,” he choked, “I’m so scared.” He let out a terrible, heart-wrenching breath that hiccuped unevenly in his throat, and Marinette felt hot drops land somewhere near her collarbone as his shoulders trembled. The patches tumbled out of her hands and onto the floor as she clung to him, trying desperately to offer him some kind of comfort, while her heart tore itself to pieces hearing him cry. Chat Noir had _never_ cried in front of her - not as Ladybug, and not as Marinette. It left her with a tremendous feeling of wrongness and guilt. _‘This is my fault.’_

In her head, Marinette screamed at herself to tell Chat Noir her identity, to tell him she was safe, that she was here, that it was going to be okay - but the part of her that had so fiercely guarded that secret would not relinquish its hold on her throat. All she could do was hold him close as the storm raged outside.

The rain pelted her window angrily, and the wind battered the shutters. In the end, Marinette was silent, and for that, she felt she deserved the hurt.

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow up or ask us questions over here: http://punnpkinpatch.tumblr.com  
> We also do concept doodles for this fic on tumblr!


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